About the business:Jose Villa started his digital ad firm with his own money shortly after he graduated from college. Sensis makes a point of bringing in a number of employees that have no advertising background whatsoever to draw in people who think differently than the kinds of people hired by its competitors. Sensis' staffers speak nine languages and it does business in every one of them.

The Initiative for a Competitive Inner City (ICIC) defines inner cities as core urban areas with higher unemployment and poverty rates and lower median incomes than their surrounding metropolitan statistical areas. For the 2012 list, ICIC received more than 2,000 solicited nominations using its database of small businesses and through the support of its nominating partners, including the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, Staples, New York City Department of Small Business Services, and the U.S. Conference of Mayors. Companies were ranked by compound annual growth rate (CAGR) based on their revenue over the five-year period between 2006 and 2010, the last year for which complete data was available. This list was audited by the independent accounting firm of Rucci Bardaro and Barrett, PC.